Drupal 7 Starter Themes

A Feature Comparison of the Leading Foundational Themes

This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 2 Issue 1, , on pages 20-21, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at DrupalCon Denver, . The article was also published on their website.

There are many ways to create a Drupal theme, but probably the most common general approach is to modify an existing theme — instead of building one from scratch. In the Drupal world, the phrase "starter theme" refers to any theme that is intended to be used as a starting point for developing a custom theme. Such starter themes tend to be simple and stripped-down, with no aesthetic styling.

Theoretically, any Drupal theme, even the most complex, could be used as a foundation upon which to build a new theme. But beginning with an existing complex theme would be counterproductive in most cases, because time and effort would be required to remove all of the complexity and styling not desired for the intended final theme — which could be much of the HTML and CSS code, and would defeat the purpose of choosing that theme in the first place.

Sometimes the phrase "base theme" is conflated with the idea of a starter theme, but they are not synonymous. Instead, a base theme is one from which your new theme will inherit all properties, simply by specifying, in the .info file of your new theme, the command: base = base theme name. Yet a starter theme does not have to be used as a base theme; it can be modified directly, to stand on its own. None of the starter themes examined here utilize base themes, but at least one was intentionally developed from another theme — specifically, Basic is derived from Zen.

In either case, be sure to update the template files (.tpl.php), as well as any template.php, to replace the machine name of the starter theme with whatever you have chosen for your custom theme.

All the leading starter themes include the bare minimum of a .info file, as well as at least one stylesheet and screenshot. Most also add template files and a logo. Some are quite advanced, with capabilities that allow you to define your new theme through a graphical user interface, with no need to edit any CSS files. Others are much more minimalist — such as Stark, which is intended to show Drupal output completely unstyled (mostly for debugging purposes).

When it comes time to create a new theme, you may understandably wonder where to begin, and what starter theme could be the best candidate to meet your needs. Asking the advice of someone more experienced may yield a worthy suggestion, or you may end up with only a recommendation to use whatever starter theme that person stumbled upon and continued using, out of habit, without researching alternatives.

In order to help you with your research, the table shown here compares the commonly-used starter themes (that have versions for Drupal 7), to see how their features stack up against one another.

Theme name Drupal versions Markup Layout types Themeable by UI Dimension units in UI Regions CSS reset Print CSS IE fixes Page class in <body> Mobile Accessibility Source ordered RTL support Subthemes Documentation
AdaptiveTheme 6, 7 HTML5 + RDFa fixed, fluid yes, including breadcrumbs and search results %, em, px 12 custom yes yes, using override classes yes WCAG yes some 2 articles at adaptivethemes.com
Arctica 7 HTML5 + RDFa fixed, fluid yes, including Drupal core CSS files %, em, px 11 HTML5 Doctor yes yes, using polyfills yes yes 2
Basic 6, 7 XHTML + RDFa 1.0 fixed 7 YUI yes some yes yes Zen documentation mostly applies
BigDaddy 6, 7 HTML5 fixed 10 HTML5 Doctor yes yes
Boilerplate 7 HTML5 fixed 9 HTML5 Boilerplate, partial YUI yes yes yes yes yes
Boron 6, 7 HTML + RDFa 1.1 fixed 7 yes WAI-ARIA roles yes
Detamo 7 XHTML + RDFa 1.0 fluid, vertical grids % 15 Eric Meyer yes yes yes yes
Doune 7 HTML + RDFa 1.1 fixed, vertical grids 11 Skeleton yes yes yes yes
Fluid Baseline Grid 6, 7 vertical grids 12 yes yes yes
Framework 6, 7 HTML5 fixed 8 Eric Meyer yes yes
Fusion 6, 7 XHTML + RDFa 1.0 fixed, fluid, vertical grids yes, including typography px 14 yes yes 2 handbooks
Genesis 6, 7 XHTML + RDFa 1.0 fixed, fluid, vertical grids 10 WAI-ARIA roles yes 1 Drupal.org posts
mothership 7 HTML5 fluid 7 Eric Meyer, HTML5 Doctor, normalize.css optional 3
NineSixty (960 Grid System) 6, 7 fixed, vertical grids 8 Eric Meyer yes yes yes
OM 2 HTML5 6, 7, 8 HTML5 fixed, vertical grids 7 custom some yes 2 Drupal.org post
Omega 6, 7 HTML + RDFa 1.1 fixed, fluid, vertical grids yes, with fine-grain control scaling factors 18 Eric Meyer yes yes 3 website; handbook; screencast
Panels 960gs 7 HTML + RDFa 1.1 fixed, fluid, vertical grids 2 custom yes WAI-ARIA roles yes
Sasson 7 HTML + RDFa 1.1 fixed, vertical grids yes px 10 Boilerplate yes yes yes yes website
Square Grid 7 XHTML + RDFa 1.0 fixed, vertical grids some px 7 Eric Meyer yes yes yes Drupal.org post; website
Stark 6, 7 fluid 7 yes some yes yes
Tao 6, 7 fluid, vertical grids 7 Eric Meyer yes yes yes
Zen 6, 7 XHTML + RDFa 1.0 fixed, fluid 9 yes yes yes yes yes 1 code comments

Table Header Labels

In the table, to avoid the problem of the header labels becoming too lengthy, they were made fairly concise, which is sometimes difficult for technical topics. Consequently, most of them could use some explanation:

For any given starter theme, if a feature is not available, rather than indicating in the table "no" or "none" (or "N/A", in the case of the "Dimension units in UI"), the cell is left empty, so it is easier for the reader to quickly see which themes have more features in general.

Additional Features

It is possible that a feature may be indicated here as being unavailable, and yet it actually is offered by the theme, or could be added easily — but this was not explained prominently in the theme's documentation or evident in the HTML markup it produced. For instance, a theme may support WCAG, but does not advertise it on its project page.

In the interests of minimizing the size of the table, some information is not included, for those features that are consistent throughout these themes. For instance, years ago, not all starter themes supported the "core features" (a website name, slogan, logo, favicon, search box, etc.); but nowadays, most, if not all of them, do so.

In the past, some starter themes offered native support for the Color module, which allows administrators to easily modify the color scheme. But in this era of Drupal 7, none of the starter themes appear to have integrated the Color module.

Also, none of the themes have explicit Panels integration, except for Panels 960gs — although Genesis works with Gpanels, and Omega has some project notes that suggest it has been made Panels compatible.

The Skinr module is intended to allow themers to package up sets of CSS styles, and to make them modular and available for reuse on other websites. Being unfamiliar with it, I was uncertain as to which themes could be considered to have Skinr integration; hence I chose not to guess. However, the documentation for Arctica and Fusion suggest that they are compatible with Skinr.

This information should be helpful to anyone trying to decide which starter theme to use as a beginning point for his or her work.

Copyright © 2012 Michael J. Ross. All rights reserved.
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